Bringing your pet back to life? An extravagant idea, which recalls horror scenarios, but very concrete. All you need to do is save the genetic material of a dog or cat (a fragment of skin, a few drops of blood) and highly specialized laboratories will produce identical puppies through cloning.
A theme brought to the fore by former American football player Tom Brady, who just in November declared that his new dog Junie was actually a clone of Lua, the pitbull mix lost in 2023. Brady is not an isolated case: in the past, Barry Diller and Diane von Fürstenberg, he a film producer and she a stylist, had advertised the cloning of their Shannon, a Jack Russell Terrier, as had the singer Barbra Streisand and the showgirl Paris Hilton, both are so fond of their pets that they want them back with them even in a double version. But the winner is the Argentine president Javier Milei, who wanted five clones of his Conan, the beloved English mastiff who died in 2017.
In Italy duplication is prohibited, except for scientific purposes, but it is possible to purchase four-legged copies abroad. And there is no shortage of people who have given it some thought. «We currently have about ten Italian customers», Ovoclone, a company in the sector based in Marbella, Spain, tells Panorama. Certainly, these are people who spare no expense: if buying a puppy from a breeding farm is now a small luxury (some breeds, such as the very fashionable French bulldogs, can cost up to 2 thousand euros) cloning is a business for the super rich. For a dog or a cat you need 50-55 thousand euros, while to duplicate a horse no one will move for less than 80 thousand. Stellar figures, yet “in recent years demand has increased”, explains the Spanish company. Which specifies: «Dogs are undoubtedly the most requested and the average age of the owners is between 35 and 60 years».
Similar news also comes from the rest of the world. In China, the recent spread of cloning is associated with the growing presence of pets in families, now more numerous than children under 4 years of age. And already in 2023 this trend was reflected in the amazing economic results of the then startup Sinogene Biotechnology, a pet cloning company based in Beijing. Ditto in the United States, where the Texan Viagen Pets declared to the press that it duplicates around 200 pets a year, with five-month waiting lists, and that it has doubled its turnover between 2017 and 2022.
We are talking about a modern market founded on a technique discovered in the 1960s by the English biologist John Gurdon, awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012 and who died last October at the age of 92 (for the cynics: no, he didn’t allow himself to be cloned). It was he who created the first doubling of a complex living being: an African aquatic frog (even if the true progenitor was a sea urchin at the end of the nineteenth century). The most famous case, however, is that of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal “recreated” in 1996. Afterwards, everything and more: in 2001 a cat, named CopyCat; within two years a mare, Prometea; in 2005 Snuppy, an Afghan hound; while in 2009 Injaz was born, a clone of a camel. He was followed by cows, pigs and other species.
«Over time there have been improvements, but the procedure remains the same», explains Marco Onorati, professor of Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Pisa. «The DNA is taken from the “original” animal through skin or blood cells (preserved while the pet is alive or immediately after its death), it is inserted into an oocyte donated by another female specimen, emptied of the genetic material, it is electrically stimulated in vitro to promote embryonic development, and then it is transferred into the uterus of a surrogate mother of the same species, who will host the pregnancy until birth». The result? A 99.9 percent identical twin, who can be born months, or even years, after the disappearance of your pet. «Before managing to develop an embryo and proceed with implantation, there can be many attempts, even dozens. This is probably why the price is so high,” comments the expert. «Clones are at greater risk of cardiac or respiratory complications during development and soon after birth. Fortunately, those who survive do not get sicker than non-clones and life expectancy is also similar.” Snuppy, for example, died at 10 years old, just two years before his donor, Tai, and from the same disease.
Although companies guarantee the safety of the procedure, the phenomenon is considered unethical. Animal rights activists argue that surrogate mothers experience unnecessary suffering and that this market contributes to the development of an animal subclass that exists only to produce clones. «It is plausible that companies have colonies of dogs and cats used solely to donate eggs and carry on pregnancies», reflects the biologist. «As far as suffering is concerned, the animal to be cloned undergoes at most a biopsy of a few millimeters or a blood sample. Rather, it is the female donors and those who support the pregnancy who have to endure more invasive and stressful procedures.” Which is why in Italy cloning gets a no from the Anti-Vivisection League (LAV). «In our country there are over 69 thousand dogs waiting for adoption in shelters. Do we really need to duplicate more of them? Let us remember that, as Tom Brady himself admitted, the clones are the same in appearance, but not in character”, comments Alessandra Ferrari, head of the association for the family animals area. «We are not afraid of the emulation effect, because these are figures accessible to few, but precisely because they are often well-known people, with adoption they could set a more virtuous example».
After all, Gurdon’s studies were not aimed at bringing lap puppies back to life. «Thanks to his work we discovered how embryonic development and the biology of pluripotent cells work, which have revolutionized transplants and the study of diseases such as Parkinson’s», recalls Onorati. «But cloning, combined with genetic engineering, also allows us to obtain animals with mutations that cause pathologies in humans, to analyze their onset, evolution and treatment, or to duplicate species for the production of relevant molecules or drugs. Furthermore, it could reduce the problem of transplants: the generation of pigs without the genes that cause rejection in humans is an interesting frontier for increasing the availability of organs.”
It is also that of saving endangered species: last year a female black-footed ferret, cloned in 2020 from genetic material preserved years earlier, gave birth to two healthy puppies in a zoo in Virginia, contributing to the survival of her peers. In San Diego, the same method was used to save the Przewalski’s horse, a now very rare wild equine species.
The environmental cause is noble for most scientists, if it weren’t for the intentions of the American company Colossal Biosciences, which recently declared its intention to use cloning to bring back to life specimens that have been extinct for millennia. It would have already done so with the Pleistocene wolf: according to the company, the two puppies born last April, Romulus and Remus, are the first examples of animals brought back to life after an extinction that occurred ten thousand years ago. For science, however, they are simply gray wolves with some genetic fragments identical to those of the prehistoric wolf. The next goals? Dodo, mammoth, Tasmanian tiger. Environmentalists shake their heads: their disappearance occurred due to habitat changes that persist today. The mammoth, after all, lived during the ice age… In short, rather than a solution to ecological challenges, it seems like a film script. But in reality someone already thought about it in the nineties: the director was called Steven Spielberg, the film Jurassic Park.
